Introduction

CEditWithButton is a simple edit control class derived from CEdit
(MFC) that looks like the iTunes Find Edit Control. The edit control can
show an icon and a button. This class can be used when ever an edit control and
a button go together. Example: Browsing a file, folder; Finding etc.

This is my first article at CodeProject. For years I have only used great
code from CodeProject. I thank you all for sharing excellent code. Thank you
very much. I hope to write more articles in the near future. Please do not
hesitate to comment on my code. I wish to learn and improve.

Thanks to Johan Rosengren for his article An edit
box with an icon. He revealed the affect of WM_SETFONT message
on an edit control in this article.

Using the code

1. Defining the class

Create an edit control in your dialog box and add a variable of type
CEditWithButton. If you have already added a variable which is of
type CEdit, then you can just rename CEdit to CEditWithButton
and #include "EditWithButton.h" at the top of the dialog header
file.

2. Using the class

The class accepts 2 bitmaps. The first bitmap is drawn as a background of the
edit control when it is empty. The second bitmap is drawn as a background when
the edit control contains some text in it. The first bitmap is a background
without the button. The second bitmap is the background with the button.

Next, we need to set the edit area and the button area. We need to do this
because only part of the edit control is editable. The left and right area are
covered by the icon (magnifying glass in our case) and the button (x button in
our case).

//edit area is rectangle without the icon and the button
//the white space where the user will type
CRect rcEditArea(20,4,125,17);
m_editFind.SetEditArea(rcEditArea);
//button area used to determine the mouse button click
CRect rcButtonArea(128,3,143,18);
m_editFind.SetButtonArea(rcButtonArea);

Next, when the user clicks on the button, this message is sent to the the
owner in order to let it handle the button click event.

//owner window to which the button click notification will be sent
m_editFind.SetOwner(this);
//message that will be sent to the owner window
m_editFind.SetButtonClickedMessageId(WM_USER_EDITWITHBUTTON_CLICKED);

If the button exists always (even if the edit control does not have any text)
then you need to set this flag to TRUE using the
SetButtonExistsAlways method. This enables the class to send the
button click even even when there is no text in the edit control.

In our
case, we have set to FALSE because we are using it as a find edit control where
in the button is hidden when the edit control is empty.

m_editFind.SetButtonExistsAlways(FALSE);

Points of Interest (Must Read)

In order to set the edit area for an edit control, we use the
CEdit::SetRect method internally. This method succeeds only if the
edit control has the multi-line style set (ES_MULTILINE). If you
are inserting the edit control in a dialog, make sure the multi-line property is
set to True using the resource editor. Also make sure that ES_WANTRETURN
is set to False.

If you are creating the edit control dynamically you must set the edit
control's font explicitly in order to make it work perfectly. See the following
example code:

//Get the font from the parent (typically a dialog) and set it to the
//edit control
m_editFind.SetFont(GetFont())

History

3rd August 2006: Updated the code so that the edit control can be created
dynamically.

2nd August 2006: First public release

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.